Prescription opioids bigger factor than economic misfortune in crisis
The availability of prescription opioids appears to be a bigger driver of the opioid crisis than economic misfortune, according to recent research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
The Cleveland Fed is one of 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, and its district covers Ohio, western Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky and the northern panhandle of West Virginia.
The region was hit hard by the opioid crisis. While opioid overdose deaths increased 528 percent nationally from 1999 to 2016, they jumped 736 percent in Pennsylvania, and by more than 1,000 percent in Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia, according to a Cleveland Fed analysis.
But opioid deaths alone didn’t reveal the full economic impact.
Cleveland Fed surveys of regional businesses, economic development agencies and social service providers showed that opioid use made it harder for companies to find workers who could pass drug tests and strained social services, such as foster care and addiction treatment.
But was opioid abuse a cause or a result of declining economic conditions? That’s a question the Cleveland Fed began researching last year.
Researchers found that prime-age men and women in areas with higher opioid prescription rates were less likely to participate in the labor force and have jobs from 2006 to 2016. The difference was nearly 5 percentage points for men and 1.4 percentage points for women between areas with the highest and lowest prescription rates.
“That’s effectively like doubling your unemployment rate,” said Mark E. Schweitzer, the Cleveland Fed’s senior vice president of research and community development.
But when researchers looked at data from the Great Recession, they found opioid use during that time remained stable despite a tough economy.
While not a direct test of the “deaths of despair” theory, the stability of opioid abuse rates during the Great Recession suggested that the main contributors to such deaths were outside the labor market, according to the paper.
Schweitzer said the research doesn’t say that ending opioid prescriptions would send everyone back into the labor force. Nor did the research consider the rise of illegal, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.
The paper also cautioned against the idea that an improved economy would solve drug abuse issues.
Schweitzer said he anticipated doing more research to pin down whether bad economic situations generate drug use or more drug use generates bad labor markets.
Along with the deaths and other tragedies in the opioid crisis, “we want to emphasize it is having significant economic impacts and deserves a lot of attention,” Schweitzer said.
Reach Shane at 330-580-8338 or shane.hoover@cantonrep.com
On Twitter: @shooverREP